The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Andrew M LeBlanc’s story “Reproduction in a Closed Loop” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 5 October 2018. Time-loop stories are typically finite. In Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow, the protagonist gets to exit the time-loop once they’ve achieved their goal (whether that goal is military victory or love). But what if the protagonist’s goal was impossible? What if they could never leave the time-loop? I was driven to ask this question by “The …
Kai Hudson’s story “Combustion” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 28 September 2018. Though it certainly doesn’t read like one, “Combustion” is a pretty political piece for me. I kept seeing these terrible news stories about people mistreating other people (police shooting unarmed black men, countries turning away Syrian refugees, the violence of ISIS, etc.), yet political apathy and indifference seemed to be at an all-time high. My social media was full of posts and …
E.A. Brenner’s story “Familiar in Her Angles” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 21 September 2018. In the summer of 2015, I read Angel Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories for the first time, and the first draft of “Familiar in Her Angles” popped out. I struggle to write short stories, so I was surprised how quickly that first draft came, amazed I managed to get from start to finish in only a few …
Michael Milne’s story “The Yarnball Woman” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 14 September 2018. “The Yarnball Woman” came to me after lots of discussions about dementia with a close friend. Her own mother was going through early onset dementia, and I had just finished a university course on the psychology of aging. My friend talked about the pieces of her mother which were long gone, and how much more she seemed to lose than …
B. Morris Allen’s story “Graven Image” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 7 September 2018. Some stories come all at once, and some come in stages. “Graven Image” was one of the latter. I can’t remember why, but I wanted to write a story about frottage – the technique of creating a design by placing paper over an image and rubbing a colored substance on it – perhaps familiar to some from grave-rubbing. I combined …
Douglas Anstruther’s story “Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 31 August 2018. I wanted to explore the idea that perfect prediction of the future could be confused with, and possibly be indistinguishable from, actually experiencing the future. As I wrote, I discovered that for someone with the ability to do this, the concept of the present became less relevant, and along with it, the notion of mortality. In …
